From Gloria Brame, who is practically doing my job for me.
Date and origin unknown, sadly. Note the Orientalist artifacts: Persian rugs, anklets, turban, arm bracelets, the servant-mistress relationship indicated by their positions, the direct sightlines. I’m curious where the black woman came from and how she ended up in a photographer’s studio somewhere in Europe.
You could see it as a take on Manet’s Olympia, though in this case the black woman’s sexuality is not completely erased.
Fetish Pop Culture has a selection of spanking illustrations by Louis Malteste.
From what I can tell, the above novel was published in 1911 or 1912, and “Sadie Blackeyes” was one of the many pseudonyms of Pierre Dumarchey, better known as Mac Orlan. Dumarchey seemed to have a different pseudonym for each kink. “Sadie Blackeyes” was all about the spanking/flagellation and lesbianism.
From Youtube, a video lecture/slideshow about the evolution of the French Maid fetish icon.
Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse 1999. Link
Schick makes one point very clear at the outset: don’t simplify Orientalism into “West=male/Orient=female”. There are too many alternate ways of characterizing the two civilizations. Some saw the West as a vulnerable female sexually threatened by the masculine Orient. Female Western visitors to Turkey or Persia sometimes saw the lives of Oriental women as having more agency and autonomy. Writers from all over the political spectrum have used the (fantastic, largely imaginary) harem as an allegory of society. TE Lawrence say Oriental men as masculine role models. These portrayals were driven by everything from anxieties and fears to confusion to “outright self-loathing.”
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and death in the American novel 1966.Link
In Fiedler’s book, it all comes from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: Lovelace and Clarissa are the encounter of the male principle and the female principle, the aristocracy and the newly risen bourgeoisie, reason and sentimentality. Everything from the romance paperback to sadomasochistic pornography is the distant, debased descendants from Clarissa, the first modern novel.
Petticoat Punishment Art has scans and excerpts of Facts and Fancies, a largely hand-made fetish magazine published in England in the early 1930s.
Lively, Adam. Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination Oxford University Press, 2000. Link
The history of BDSM is not about straight lines. There is no one perfect point of “pure BDSM” from which everything else flows, no perfect authentic moment. Instead, there’s an endless series of mirrors, masks and myths. The persistent myth of the “ancient European slave training houses” is the sign of a yearning for certainty in a subculture that has always been about an aggregation of individual fantasies.
Ms. Muze’s guest post on Let them eat pro-SM feminist safe spaces has an intriguing theory about the idea that BDSM is a symptom of the lessening of the class division in society, and thus less sexual access to lower status people.
We have a solid literary record stretching back at least three hundred years of a culture where women were expected to maintain their virtue through chastity, young men were expected to engage in casual sex, and there was plenty of kinky porn. Probably those things have been true much longer; it’s my personal knowledge of literary history that goes back only that far, not the existence of kinky porn. If “women”, by which we mean middle- and upper-class women, were all going to their marriage beds virgins, who were these guys fucking?
The servants. Prostitutes. Poor girls. These are the people de Sade was routinely accused of abusing and molesting before he was imprisoned. The people who over and over again in literature and historical record are raped, knocked up, “ruined” and cast aside by men of a higher social class who would never dream of laying an improper hand on their social peers.
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We now have a culture where young men are taught to view young women of their own class as sexual commodities, while a few generations ago they would have been brought up to view their female peers as the “angels in the house” whom they might love or marry and the lower class women in their lives as sex objects who they might fuck, with or without consent. A man growing up today learns to look to his girlfriend/wife to play out violent fantasies that he might once have satisfied with a prostitute or not at all.
This cultural shift gives us a lot of great things – sexual agency! safe, sane, consensual kink! birth control! – but with it we have all inherited some of the risk that used to belong more clearly to women on the fringes of respectable society. It’s not BDSM, or its watered-down aesthetic leaking into mainstream porn, that contributes to a culture of rape.
There is a complex relationship between real “rape culture” (e.g. pre Civil War South) and the theatrical performance of such.
The US policy on torture is much in the air today. Some of the defenders of the policy liken the kinds of “stress positions” and the like allowed to be used to fraternity hazings.
One interesting angle is comparing torture to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, used by the US military to prepare soldiers for being tortured. Slate compares SERE and real torture, making explicit comparisons between the former and BDSM.
Third, SERE offers interventions that relieve stress and reinforce the unreality of the exercise. Instructors and psychologists are available “to watch the students for indications that they are not coping well with training tasks, provide corrective interventions with them long before they become overwhelmed, and if need be, remotivate students who have become overwhelmed to enable them to succeed,” Ogrisseg noted.
Fourth, SERE has “defined starting and ending points. … [T]rainees arrive on a certain date and know that they will depart on a specified date.”
Fifth and most important, SERE is voluntary. “Students can withdraw from training,” Ogrisseg noted. In a report issued four months ago, the Armed Services Committee added that in SERE, “students are even given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop” any ordeal.
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The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can’t tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can’t tell the difference between torture and training?
In this argument, the social context matters.
Over on Susie Bright’s blog, she talks about the impact SERE training had on her Airforce Academy boyfriend in the early 1970s:
In addition to the group beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sound/noise torture, starvation, dehydration, he was also forced to eat human feces and vomit, in accompaniment with the beatings. They had replicas of “tiger cages’ they kept him in. He wrote me that after awhile of knowing it was all a training, he couldn’t hold the frame anymore and it became nothing but his reality. His sense of time and self evaporated.
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His father was Air Force— and I think even he was taken aback by the SERE training. Afterward, as far as I could tell, Robbie had a psychological breakdown. He wasn’t the same guy. I was afraid of him.
They’d given him some very peculiar advice about women— it creeped me out. I was, like, ‘HEY, it’s me, remember?” But he didn’t. He hurt me when we made love, my back bled. He acted like we were supposed to play this out until I got “tougher” and could take it. It didn’t have anything to do with “kink” or fun.
The Slate article says that the “frame” is very important, the subject’s awareness that there are rules and limits to this, that there is a safeword. However, Bright’s account suggests that it is not always possible to maintain that frame.
Here’s the full quote from the previous post, from Adam Lively’s Masks.
[T]he poor African is … fair game for every minstrel that has tuned his lyre to the sweet chords of pity and condolence; whether he builds immortal verse upon his loss of liberty, or weaves his melancholy fate into the pathos of a novel, in either case he finds a mine of sentiment, digs up enthusiasm from its richest vein, and gratifies at once his spleen and his ambition.
Richard Cumberland, Introduction to Henry (1795)
Cumberland’s derisive tone show that this was written when sentimentalism was no longer a valid idea.
